page_title: Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia
section_title: 20th and 21st centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia / History / 20th and 21st centuries
caption_attribution_description: St Mary's Church, Parnell, New Zealand. Taken from the North on 17 January 2006.
context_page_description: The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia is a province of the Anglican Communion serving New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and the Cook Islands. Since 1992 the church has consisted of three tikanga or cultural streams: Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia. The church's constitution says that, among other things, it is required to "maintain the right of every person to choose any particular cultural expression of the faith". As a result, the church's General Synod has agreed upon the development of the three-person primacy based on this three tikanga system. It has three primates, each representing a tikanga, who share authority.
  The Anglican Church is an apostolic church, tracing its bishops back to the apostles via holy orders. A New Zealand Prayer Book, He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa, containing traditional liturgies, rites and blessings, is central to the church's worship. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the New Zealand Anglican Church has pursued a decidedly more liberal course; it has approved the marriage by a priest in a church of someone whose earlier marriage was dissolved, and has approved blessings for same-sex couples.
context_section_description: By 1936 the proportion of Anglicans in the total population had dropped from half to 40%. Anglican numbers declined more sharply from the mid-1960s. Around 900,000 people identified themselves as Anglican in 1976, 800,000 in 1981 and 580,000 in 2001. In the 2013 census 12% of the population, or 460,000 people, identified themselves as Anglicans. Anglicanism was the country’s second largest religious denomination after Catholicism. In parishes (local church communities) that no longer had enough church members to financially support a stipended priest, schemes for local people or self-supporting (in part or in whole) priests to take responsibility for the tasks of ministry were developed.
  The General Synod of the church adopted a revised constitution in 1992. This introduced the tikanga system.
  A New Zealand Prayer Book, He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa, was published in 1989 (after a period of revision starting in 1964). It was received with general enthusiasm and has largely supplanted usage of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) since the 1990s.
caption: St Mary's Church was the cathedral of Auckland until 1973
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